Ships to Brazil buried fewer of their captives than ships to the islands

Between 1638 and 1775 a captive loaded for Brazil stood a better chance of reaching land alive than one loaded for the Caribbean. Eltis and Richardson set the two systems side by side and find death rates on the Brazil run substantially lower. Inside that figure the regional pattern turns over. On Caribbean voyages a larger share of the people taken from West Africa died. On Brazilian voyages a larger share of the people taken from West Central Africa died, the country behind Luanda and the Congo mouth, even though their crossing was probably the shorter one. Part of the gap has a blunt explanation. Brazilian traders in these years bought very little in the Bight of Biafra, the stretch of coast whose voyages carried the worst shipboard mortality of any region in the trade. A market that avoided one supply zone recorded better survival without changing anything aboard its ships. These numbers describe purchasing habits as much as they describe conditions below deck.

In March 1685 the French crown issued the edict known as the Code Noir. Its sixty articles set out how enslaved people in the French colonies were to be held, fed, clothed, punished, married, baptised and buried. It required conversion to Catholicism and expelled Jews from the colonies. It defined the enslaved as movable property while also treating them as persons capable of crime and of religious duty, a contradiction the colonial courts spent a century managing. It fixed that a child followed the condition of its mother, which made every child born to an enslaved woman the property of her owner and made rape profitable. It placed some limits on masters, requiring rations and clothing and forbidding certain killings, and enforcement of those limits was rare. The edict framed French colonial slavery until 1848. Saint-Domingue was the colony where it governed the most people, and the people it governed there ended it themselves in 1793.

Louis XIV of France and William III of England closed their war in 1697 by exchanging territory neither of them had ever seen. The Treaty of Ryswick was a general settlement covering Europe, North America and the Caribbean, and among its terms Spain gave up the western third of Hispaniola to France. Spain had held nominal title to the whole island for two centuries and had governed the western end of it hardly at all, its own settlers having withdrawn eastward long before. France received the piece that turned out to matter. Over the following century Saint-Domingue produced revenue on a scale that is hard to state without sounding careless. By the 1780s the colony was worth more to France, in trade and customs receipts, than the thirteen British colonies of North America were worth to Britain. One third of one Caribbean island out-earned the eastern seaboard of a continent. That is the wealth the enslaved population created, and it is the wealth they carried out of the empire with them.

Leaving the king's camp, Beatrice led a group of ordinary people back to Sao Salvador and made her home beside the cathedral, on the ground where the bishop had once lived. She sent out messengers, called little Anthonies, across the country to summon people to the capital. Soyo and Nsundi threw them out. Elsewhere the movement caught, and another Capuchin met it near the sea in mid 1705. The city filled up. Beatrice was hailed as the true nganga, the one restoring the kingdom, and Bernardo da Gallo was mocked as little Bernardo, the cowardly nganga who had lacked the nerve to lead the people home. Her teaching grew: Christ had been born at Sao Salvador, the true Bethlehem, and baptised at Nsundi in the river Zaire. Marriage, baptism, confession and prayer counted for nothing in themselves, she said, because God looks at the intention.